The Address on the Envelope

They left at five in the morning, in fog as thick as milk. Katherine came out to see them off in Mum's blue coat, thrown over her pyjamas.

"Ring the minute you get there," Katherine said. "And… tell him…"

She didn't finish. She just stood by the gate with her arms wrapped around herself, looking very small in the fog.

For the first two hours they drove in silence. Beyond the window the wet fields of Kent gave way to the grey edges of London, and then to the flatlands of East Anglia, where the sky was so big it made your head spin.

"Can I ask you something?" Nigel said, somewhere near Cambridge.

"Go on."

"Why didn't you come home? These last few years. Mum always said you were busy, but…" He tightened his grip on the wheel. "I thought you were angry with us. With me. After that row at Mum's birthday four years ago."

Florence remembered the row. Katherine had said something about Florence "playing at being a photographer" while everyone else was working. Nigel had said nothing. Florence had left that same evening and hadn't been back for four years.

"I wasn't angry," she said. "I was ashamed."

"Of what?"

"That Kat was right." Florence smiled, without much humour. "In Edinburgh I've got a tiny rented flat, three jobs a month if I'm lucky, and a pile of rejections from galleries. I had a husband, Euan. We split up last year. I didn't tell anyone. Not even Mum."

Nigel glanced at her.

"Why not?"

"Because every time she rang and asked, 'How are you, sweetheart?' I wanted to have something to tell her. Something good. Something she could be proud of. And there wasn't anything. So I said I was busy and hung up."

"She was proud of you," Nigel said. "I've seen your photos in her bedroom. On the wall. All your exhibitions, the newspaper cuttings. Even that little piece in the Edinburgh Evening News. Framed."

Florence turned to the window.

"You and me, we're the same," Nigel said. "We lied to her so she wouldn't worry. And she lied to us so we wouldn't worry. A whole family of liars who loved each other."

"Kat didn't lie."

"Kat rang every Sunday and talked about her job." Nigel shook his head. "You saw her face yesterday when Lily mentioned eight o'clock. Do you think she ever once asked Mum how she was really getting on?"

Florence didn't answer. A sign came up ahead: Norwich 30.

Lily was waiting for them outside St Luke's — tall, thin, twenty-three, in jeans and a worn jumper, her hair pulled back any old how. Florence recognised her from the car: the girl from Dad's report, only grown up.

And the eyes. Mum's eyes. Grey, with a dark ring around the iris.

Lily was looking at her too — for a long time, closely.

"You look like her," Lily said instead of hello. "I've seen her photo. Dad showed me."

"So do you," said Florence. Her voice wouldn't behave.

Then Lily stepped forward and hugged Florence — awkwardly, hurriedly, the way people hug at railway stations — and Florence felt her shoulders shaking.

"I don't know how to tell him," Lily whispered. "I couldn't. He's barely holding on as it is. The doctors say the transplanted kidney's failing. He's waiting for another transplant, but the list… And he keeps asking why she hasn't rung. He thinks she's given him up again."

"We'll tell him," Nigel said, and for the first time in years Florence heard Dad in his voice. "That's why we've come."

The renal ward was on the fourth floor. A long corridor, the smell of antiseptic, machines beeping softly behind half-open doors. Lily walked ahead, Florence and Nigel behind her, and with every step Florence felt her body grow heavier, as if the corridor were running uphill.

She thought about Mum walking down this same corridor on the third of August — in her blue coat, a train ticket in her pocket — for the first and last time.

Lily stopped outside room four hundred and twelve.

"He's awake," she said. "He hardly sleeps now."

She opened the door.

A single room. A window looking out on a grey city roof. On the bedside table — a glass of water, glasses, a battered old book on the Tudors. On the windowsill — a little pot with a miniature rose, yellow, its petals beginning to droop.

Mum's variety. Florence would have known it anywhere. Mum had grown those roses under the kitchen window for thirty years.

The man in the bed was pale and gaunt, with drip lines running into his arm. The grey at his temples that Florence had seen in the photograph had spread through all his hair. He turned his head at the sound of the door — slightly to one side, as if listening for something — and Florence stopped breathing.

He looked at Lily. Then at Nigel. Then at Florence — and his gaze stayed there.

For a few seconds he simply looked. And then something flared in his eyes, something so defenceless, so childlike, that Florence understood everything before he spoke.

He had seen Mum in her. And for a moment he'd believed it.

"Margaret?" Thomas Banks whispered. And then, as he realised his mistake, his face slowly changed — the hope fading like the light in a room where someone is gradually turning down a dimmer switch. "No. You're her daughter. Of course." He swallowed. "Where is she? Why didn't she come herself?"